barn-detail-PM-light, originally uploaded by Jock Gill.

It is time to take Vermont out of moth balls and return it to full productive and strategic use. Trucking products from Vermont a few hundred miles makes sense. Trucking anything 3,000 miles makes very little sense –given today’s realities. It is not a mystery why truckers are refusing to pick up produce in California, resulting in produce rotting in the fields.

KWB-micro-CHP, originally uploaded by Jock Gill.

Wood pellet powered Stirling engine micro-CHP is now a commercial product in Europe! This very strategic product is made by KWB of Austria, who currently refuse to sell into the North American market.

Prof. Jerry Cherney of Cornell University learned of this product last week and shared it with me today at Power Shift. This commercially available wood pellet fired micro-CHP system validates the subtitle of my 2006 Grass Energy Working Paper.

For more, see: http://www.stirlingpowermodule.com/

“The combination of the SPM module with a KWB pellet heating system ensures that wood, a renewable and domestic energy source, is optimally used for the production of heat AND energy, also in single-family homes. This power station makes it possible to produce a significant part of the annual energy requirement of an average single-family home by using the energy from a pellet heating unit.”

While this product is NOT offered in the US today, it clearly proves the point and shows what we could be doing!

This is a powerful concept and would enable us to build a bioenergy powered micro-grtrid solution for Vermont! Or we could start building out Al Gore’s Electranet today.

[Photo credit: KWB web site.]

Wall Street and Washington Are Failing Spectacularly — Where Do We Go?
By Joe Costello, AlterNet.
Posted April 15, 2008.

The U.S. political and economic systems are not equipped to deal with the looming problems of the 21st century.

I was 19 in October 1979, when I first stepped into a campaign office. It was the Draft Kennedy (Teddy) for President office, located directly east across the Daley Plaza from Chicago’s City Hall. I would work on that campaign across the country for ten months, and it would instill in me an interest in politics, more accurately an interest in the politics of self-government that has lasted 30 years. It was a time when economics dominated political discourse from the nightly news to the kitchen table. Unfortunately, little did I understand, two months before I walked into that campaign office in 1979, President Jimmy Carter had appointed Paul Volcker head of the Federal Reserve, an event that would change American politics for the next three decades. Almost everything I learned on the Kennedy campaign about how American politics worked collapsed over the course of the next ten years. A new political regime, people, institutions, thinking, and culture replaced what had been the dominance of New Deal politics. Monetarism, Reaganomics or Neoliberlism, call it what you may, would totally dominate the American political landscape until today.

—- snip

Read the whole post here.

In this essay, Joe Costello identifies some of the key changes we are facing. These changes, driven by the end of the greed powered fantasy of infinite and unlimited growth, are, however, not being addressed by any of the major candidates for President. Given that our candidates can not bear to admit that tomorrow simply can never again be like yesterday, much less that, Neoliberalism dogma to the contrary not withstanding, infinite growth is impossible, why am I not surprised?

For other sources on the changes we are facing, see J. H. Kunstler’s The Long Emergency.

Another excellent read is Tom Wessel’s The Myth of Progress.

Lastly, I blogged on our need for a new economics here on Greater Democracy.

[Note: The author of the essay below, Thompson Buchanan, is a retired Foreign Service Officer who has been sickened by the sight of America squandering the great asset of global sympathy and cooperation following 9/11, and the lives and treasure of America through an unjustified “war of choice.” He served eight years in the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War and saw how patient containment overcame an opponent infinitely more dangerous than Iraq. From his service in Africa and on African problems, he learned about the power of nationalism and the complexity of having foreign powers try to accelerate the internal processes of evolution. Having served on the front lines for his country, he does not take kindly to the un-American practice of labeling as “unpatriotic” or “defeatist” anyone who criticizes Administration policy. He argues below for a return to American ideals and international standards of conduct.]

Democrats should welcome and not shy away from debate over Iraq. It provides them with an opportunity to make the election a referendum on leadership and political judgment in matters of war and peace. The Republicans are understandably trying to use the recent small signs of progress in Iraq to whitewash their irresponsible decision to go to war in Iraq, and their mismanagement of the war. This offers the Democratic Party an opportunity to use the debate over Iraq as a “teach in”, to help American voters understand how America was stampeded into war, and what the consequences have been for the national security interests of the country. If the voting public, regardless of political persuasion, understands what happened, and the price that America has had to pay for an unjustified “war of choice,” it will have a chance at the ballot box to repudiate the Administration and policies that led us to this debacle. The hope is that future Presidents will learn from this rebuff that the American people expect in its Presidents better judgment, vision and understanding of the national interest when asking the nation to support a “war of choice.”
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By: Nick Gill

I am a left-liberal Democrat. This is about my dream team. I voted for Hillary Clinton in the Massachusetts Democratic primary. I believed she was a serious, tough, capable, intelligent politician who could do a good job as President. I also liked Barack Obama, but I felt he might be too inexperienced for the job and that Clinton was slightly better prepared. I have learned some things during the months since my vote.

Two important things I have learned are that Hillary Clinton is willing to embroider her foreign affairs experience out of whole cloth and that John McCain doesn’t really have as much foreign policy expertise as he claims. Clinton’s repeated claims to have come under sniper fire when she visited Bosnia in the 1990’s are lies. She may have thought people would believe this myth and not check whether it was true. That was simultaneously cynical and naïve. McCain has repeatedly shown that he does not really understand the demographics and strategic situation in Iraq- confusing Sunnis and Shiites. This is incredibly boneheaded. The historical schism in Islam is something I learned about in high school. For anyone running for president not to understand this basic fact, and what it means for the foreign relations of the United States, is unforgivable. This is especially true for someone who is supposedly strong in foreign affairs and was on a trip to the Middle East to prove it.

Gerald Ford’s statement in debate with Jimmy Carter in 1976 that the Soviet Union did not dominate Eastern Europe disqualified him in my mind from being President. Similarly Clinton’s and McCain’s mistakes have disqualified them for me. If you are so insecure about your foreign policy credentials that you have to lie like Clinton did, you’re not qualified to be president. If you’re a mega-bonehead on one of key elements in one the most important issues in American history, like McCain, you’re not qualified to be president.

Barack Obama’s stature has grown in my eyes, as well. This has not been by default, due to the disqualifying statements of the others. He is said to have impeccable personal integrity. He gave a deeply thoughtful speech on race relations in America on the occasion of Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday. He has also shown the capacity for solemn reflection and wisdom in his book Dreams From My Father. He was a visiting lecturer on constitutional law at the University of Chicago law school. If Al Gore were President he could do a lot worse than to appoint Obama to be Attorney General of the United States. However, Gore is not president and that is not at all likely to happen. Obama also wisely opposed the Iraq invasion at a time when it was a popular idea. I believe integrity, wisdom and respect for the U.S. Constitution are among the most important qualifications needed in the next president and Obama has evinced these strengths.
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A hard look at how one man changed the face of neoconservatism.

By Sidney Blumenthal

Apr. 14, 2008 | After Dick Cheney shot a friend in the face on a Texas hunting trip in February 2006, the national press corps began to speculate about him as one of the great mysteries of Washington, the Sphinx of the Naval Observatory, his official residence. Cheney had been known in the capital for decades through a career that carried him from congressional intern to the most powerful vice president in American history, but now his supposedly changed character became a subject of intense speculation. Brent Scowcroft, who had been George H.W. Bush’s national security adviser, and had counseled against the invasion of Iraq, told The New Yorker magazine in 2005, “I consider Cheney a good friend — I’ve known him for thirty years. But Dick Cheney I don’t know anymore.” Scowcroft’s judgment was less about Cheney’s temperament than his policy positions. The press, however, sought to disclose the sources of his “darkening persona,” as a cover story in Newsweek described it. “Has Cheney changed? Has he been transformed, warped, perhaps corrupted — by stress, wealth, aging, illness, the real terrors of the world or possibly some inner goblins?” A cover story entitled “Heart of Darkness,” published in The New Republic, suggested that Cheney’s heart disease had produced vascular dementia. “So, the next time you see Cheney behaving oddly, don’t automatically assume that he’s a bad man.”

In 2000, when Cheney, as head of George W. Bush’s search committee for a running mate, selected himself, opinion makers in Washington greeted the choice as proof positive of the younger Bush’s deference to wisdom and therefore personifying prudence. Cheney’s “manner gives him immunity from the extremist label,” assured David Broder, the longtime leading political columnist of the Washington Post. “Voters who saw his televised briefings during the Persian Gulf War remember the calm voice and thoughtful expression that are his natural style … By choosing a grown-up, Bush gave evidence of his own sense of responsibility.”

Five years later, in 2005, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, by then the former chief of staff to the former Secretary of State Colin Powell, speaking publicly at a Washington think tank, the New America Foundation, was less concerned with the press corps’ obsession with Cheney’s shifting images than with exposing his unprecedented manipulations. “What I saw was a cabal between the vice-president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made.” Though he had had extensive experience in government, Wilkerson had never before encountered such “secrecy,” “aberration” and “bastardization” in decision-making. “It is a dysfunctional process,” he said. “And to myself I said, okay, put on your academic hat. Who’s causing this?”

The whole essay is here.

In the light above, now consider Seymour Hersh’s 2007 New Yorker essay on Army Major General Antonio M. Taguba, who led the Pentagon’s investigation into the abuses at Abu Ghraib.

Abu Ghraib Investigator Details Pentagon Cover-Up: ‘I Thought I Was In The Mafia’

What is the “power network” that Cheney leads that the members do not want revealed? What role does the Federalist Society play? What role does ” the American Enterprise Institute, the oldest conservative think tank in Washington” play? Can we map the players to reveal the network and its ecology?

Evening sky, originally uploaded by Jock Gill.

More photos on Flickr. Just follow the links above. Thanks for looking.

By: DR FAROOQ HASSAN

In today’s analysis, I examine some fundamental perspectives of far reaching significance for the US towards the outcome of the truly historic Pakistani elections of February 18. In a recent column on March 25, I had articulated the grim realisation that the Bush administration, by visibly still supporting Musharraf, was deeply offending the majority of the Pakistani people. Widespread criticism of the previous regime and, of course, also of the US administration, accompanied by local wanton acts of terrorism and sabotage had wrecked havoc in the maintenance of law and order. Since the advent of the New Year, there had been 17 massive suicide blasts in a 14 week period throughout Pakistan, compared to 11 in Iraq and 4 in Afghanistan during the same period. I feared that a situation similar to that in 1980’s in Iran was conceivably in the making.

If any startling endorsement of my hypothesis was needed, it arose with such abrupt, pointed and qualitative directness as to stun the even the most diehard realist. On April 2 Islamabad, in an unprecedented meeting, the new military chief, accompanied by the country’s top intelligence officers, briefed the new civilian government about the strategic implications of the current security threats to Pakistan in the context of the US emphasis and pressures on Islamabad with respect to its war on terror.

Doctrinally, in the context of the prevalent ‘realpolitik’, this occurrence is utterly reverberating. Let me therefore advert to some salient features of this conference.

Read the whole essay here.

Posted by : Jock Gill

Originally uploaded by Jock Gill.

More images on Flickr, just follow the link above. — Thanks for looking.

South late sun ,

Thanks for looking, Jock